The LA Reporter - Issue 2

In the race to fill state Senator Maria Elena Durazo’s District 26 seat, candidate Maebe Pudlo released a video this week pointing to four donations to opponent Sara Hernandez’s campaign that came from people with ties to the influential pro-Israel group, AIPAC.

One of the donations included a $5,500 amount from Michael Tuchin, who is listed as the president of AIPAC in a 2024 press release and a 2022 tax filing.

The largest sum of $11,800 came from Richard Pachulski, who told The LA Reporter he is a close friend of Tuchin’s and donates to AIPAC. He also said he felt the donations to a state race are irrelevant to the topic of Israel, which is more relevant at the federal level. Pachulski said it was because of his connections to a Jewish temple and a charitable organization in the district that motivated him to donate.

Pudlo has called on Hernandez to return the funds, but Hernandez said in her own video on Instagram Friday that the donations, which come from individuals, do not make her an AIPAC-funded candidate. Hernandez also wrote in her post that she was disturbed by “the scale of suffering in Gaza.” 

When The LA Reporter asked one of Hernandez’s AIPAC-affiliated donors, Howard Welinsky, about a similar statement on Gaza, which also included criticism of the Israeli government’s actions, that came from Hernandez’s campaign representative, he said that he disagreed with Hernandez and said he planned to go and take it up with her. Welinsky said that while he does advocate for AIPAC, his relationship with Hernandez is limited to concerns about another deep interest of his, which is higher education — and that was the reason he donated to Hernandez.

Read the full story by The LA Reporter here.

Amid an effort underway to review and change the foundational laws of LA city government, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has weighed in on whether her position should be changed from one that is elected to an appointed one. And she says she is not for it. 

In a video out this week, Feldstein Soto told Mihran Kalaydjian, writing for CitywatchLA, that if the idea to make her office an appointed one does move forward, it would serve as a “poison pill” for the charter reform process. 

“Charter reform is good,” Feldstein Soto said. “What do I not want? I don't want my office to become appointed, and I think that if they do that it will be a poison pill in the entire charter reform process.”

Kalaydjian also asked Feldstein Soto about the City Attorney’s role in handling public corruption cases, “especially when it involves city employees.” Feldstein quickly stopped Kalaydjian, stating that “number one, I do not investigate my own client.”

“That's not my job as the City Attorney,” Feldstein Soto said. “Public corruption in the city of Los Angeles does not fall under my jurisdiction, if it is a city employee.”

The LA Reporter reached out to Feldstein Soto’s office about her statements, including her statement about public corruption by city employee not being in her jurisdiction, and has not gotten a response.

According to this report from the City Ethics Commission, the city charter had “originally specified that legal services for the commission were to be provided by the City Attorney’s Office.” That was slightly changed when voters approved Measure ER last November. That measure created two instances in which the commission is allowed to retain an “outside counsel” other than the City Attorney. One instance is when an enforcement case is against the City Attorney, and the other is when the commission is “carrying out enforcement responsibilities and duties in a specific investigation or enforcement matter.”

Feldstein Soto’s statements come as the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission meets over the next few months to hash out changes to the charter, including to the rules for and powers of the City Attorney. The commission is tasked with creating a set of final recommendations by early 2026.

The next meeting of the Charter Reform Commission is this Saturday, Sept. 13, at Los Angeles Harbor College, at 9 a.m. It will be in the multipurpose room of the Student Union Building, at 1111 Figueroa Place, Wilmington, CA 90744. Commissioners will be hearing presentations from a coalition of city unions, and the neighborhood council’s budget advocates.

A last minute effort by LA Mayor Karen Bass to cap Los Angeles’s ‘mansion tax’ fell through this week. The revenue from the tax, approved by voters in 2022 through Measure ULA, are used to pay for affordable housing and tenant protection programs.

Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, who Bass called on to help her do this, said state bill language introduced this week in the state legislature had to be fixed, but there was not enough time to do it, with this legislative session ending soon. Bass said the bill language will be worked on and reintroduced in January.

All this happened amid a fast moving few days in which SB 423, a bill about an inmate firefighter program, was gutted to carry new language that called for capping the documentary transfer tax imposed under Measure ULA for real estate transfers for certain types of properties. (According to this Capitol Weekly article, objections can be made to gutted and amended bills based on whether the new language is “germane” to the original issue, but that rarely happens, with gut-and-amend bills such as these becoming routine).

Supporters of Measure ULA estimated that the proposed language that appeared in SB 423 this week would cut revenue from the tax by 15 to 30%. Meanwhile, tenant advocates wrote an open letter to the mayor, saying that she had “sold out” the city's voters in favor of special interest.

Hertzberg had characterized the effort to change the tax as a way to encourage business leaders and others not to support a set of ballot proposals – submitted by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. – that calls for limiting voters’ ability to raise taxes. The measure also included language that said its provisions wouldn’t go into effect if the Jarvis measure are withdrawn or don’t make it to the ballot.

Read the full story by The LA Reporter here.

Samson Tafolo, an unhoused participant of the Inside Safe program at the Mayfair Hotel, said Mayor Karen Bass should have been at a town hall held at the hotel this week to give details about the building’s broken elevators.

With the elevators out of commission, elderly and disabled residents have been forced to climb multiple flights of stairs. He said he was unable to get information about when the elevators would get fixed, and others answers.

Meanwhile other city elected officials appeared to give contradictory information about the condition of the elevators, with one council member announcing that the elevators had been fixed, when they had not been.

That happened as members of LA Community Action Network (LA CAN), a group that advocates for the civil and human rights of poor and houseless people, recently took to two meetings of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee to alert city leaders of the issue. 

They were told by the chair, Nithya Raman, at the most recent meeting that the elevators were fixed, but Tafolo, also a member of LA CAN, later took pictures showing that the elevators still being blocked off by orange cones and posts and unavailable for use.

Read more about hotel residents' efforts to get clear information here.

The city’s recently approved tourism wage, which set the minimum hourly wage for airport and hotel workers at $30 by 2028, finally went into effect this week after its opponents failed to gather enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to overturn it. 

One of the key factors for the petition failing was the more than 17,000 signatures that were withdrawn, following a signature revocation campaign that supporters waged. The statistics released as part of the City Clerk’s statement about the referendum failing showed that that amount of signatures withdrawn amounted to 17,082.

Josue Marcus, a spokesperson for the City Clerk’s office, said the last referendum effort — which had been deemed sufficient before being withdrawn — had 1,005 signatures withdrawn.

Maria Hernandez, of Unite Here Local 11, said hundreds of people fanned out to talk to people outside stores and other places to convince people who were being asked to sign petitions to revoke their signatures. 

Lisandro Preza, a cashier at LAX and member of Unite Here Local 11, was among those who joined that effort to talk people into revoking their signatures from the petition.  “I feel angry that they tried to push it (tourism wage ordinance) away, but I feel happy that finally, people are gonna be able to get what they deserve,” Preza said, on Tuesday, as he and others celebrated at a rally outside Los Angeles City Hall. 

But he said he felt worried about what might happen next, saying that he thinks the proponents of the measure may try again to get rid of the wage.

But Hernandez said she believes people in general support their cause. She said she believes their campaign succeeded to beat back the referendum because “at the heart of it, Los Angeles working families understand that it's really hard to live in this city without earning enough, and so they can see themselves in what a lot of folks are asking for with the wage increase.”

Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].